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Sync Modes

AvailableCloud AvailableSelf-Managed Community (OSS)AvailableSelf-Managed Enterprise

A sync mode governs how Airbyte reads from a source and writes to a destination. Airbyte provides different sync modes to account for various use cases. To minimize confusion, a mode's behavior is reflected in its name. The easiest way to understand Airbyte's sync modes is to understand how the modes are named.

  1. The first part of the name denotes how the source connector reads data from the source:
    1. Incremental: Read records added to the source since the last sync job. (The first sync using Incremental is equivalent to a Full Refresh)
      • Method 1: Using a cursor. Generally supported by all connectors whose data source allows extracting records incrementally.
      • Method 2: Using change data capture. Only supported by some sources. See CDC for more info.
    2. Full Refresh: Read everything in the source.
  2. The second part of the sync mode name denotes how the destination connector writes data. This is not affected by how the source connector produced the data:
    1. Overwrite: Overwrite by first deleting existing data in the destination.
    2. Append: Write by adding data to existing tables in the destination.
    3. Deduped History: Write by first adding data to existing tables in the destination to keep a history of changes. The final table is produced by de-duplicating the intermediate ones using a primary key.

A sync mode is a combination of a source and destination mode together. The UI exposes the following options, whenever both source and destination connectors are capable to support it for the corresponding stream: